Published on Tuesday Poem with permission of John Stone’s widow, Mae Nelson Stone. Gaudeamus Igitur appeared in his last book of poems, "Music from Apartment 8: New and Selected Poems" published in 2004 by LSU Press.

- Editor, Renee Liang

I first came across this thought-provoking poem when an extract was read at a gathering of doctors, before finding it again on Nancy Simpson’s informativeblog. When I found that its author, John Stone, came (like me) from the dual worlds of poetry and medicine, I was hooked. I started tracking down his books.

Reading and hearing this poem, written for the 1982 commencement ceremony of Emory University’s School of Medicine, I have little explosions of recognition. At the time I graduated from medical school, I wouldn’t have understood lines like “For whole days will move in the direction of rain” and “For joy is nothing if not mysterious.” But now I do.

John Stone understood the closeness of medicine to poetry. He uses poetry to express the world of the doctor – an uncertain human being, called to show certainty and strength to the sick. One of the hardest – and easiest -- things about becoming a doctor is learning to doubt yourself. Experienced clinicians will say that doubt is often what saves them. To the young, it’s the thing they most want to avoid.

This is where learning in the arts helps me. In the arts, I think, we often work by instinct – moving in a direction that feels right. Of course we take care to do our research and hone our technical skills – but how often have we found a solution by ‘feel’? I think this is what Stone means when he writes,

For you can be trained to listen only for the oboe

out of the whole orchestra

- there’s an instinct which can be honed, not through textbooks, but only through experience. There’s always that doubt – will we find anything to ‘hear’ at all? - but we keep going anyway. And when we find it, there’s often still that ambivalence of meaning, the same ambivalence that brings us so much pleasure in reading and writing poetry. Doubt can be a strength, after all.

John Stone (1936-2008), physician-poet, was an emeritus professor of medicine in cardiology at Emory University. He also taught English Literature and Medicine at Emory and at Oxford University, England. He won numerous awards in both medicine and poetry.

Stone’s poetry collections include The Smell of Matches (1972), In All This Rain (1980), Renaming the Streets (1985), Where Water Begins: New Poems and Prose (1998), and Music From Apartment 8: New and Selected Poems (2004). In 1990 Dell published In the Country of Hearts: Journeys in the Art of Medicine, a collection of essays about the human heart, both as a physiological organ and a metaphorical symbol of life and emotion.

This week's Tuesday Poem editor Renee Liang is an Auckland poet, playwright and paediatrician. She writes and tours plays, with 'The First Asian AB' performed in Hamilton this year. Her poetry and other writing can be found on her blog Chinglish.

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